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This is a working document. It will be updated. It does not require your synchronous attention.

That is, in a sense, the point.

Principles

1. Synchronous time is expensive. Spend it on things that require it.

A meeting is a coordinated consumption of multiple people’s present moments. It is the most expensive form of collaboration available to a distributed team. This does not mean avoid meetings. It means treat them as a scarce resource, not a default.

2. Async is not slow. Poorly managed async is slow.

The reputation of asynchronous work as sluggish comes from teams that applied async methods to workflows designed for real-time response. A question left in a Slack channel with no owner, no deadline, and no context is not async work. It is abandoned work with good intentions.

3. Documentation is a time machine.

When you write something down — a decision, a context note, a summary of why the thing was done this way — you are sending information forward in time to a version of your team that does not yet exist. Treat it accordingly.

4. Time zones are a feature, not a problem.

A team distributed across twelve time zones has twelve opportunities for deep work happening at any given moment. The coordination overhead is real. The productivity dividend, properly managed, is larger.

5. The goal is alignment, not simultaneity.

Two people do not need to be in the same moment to be working toward the same thing. Continuum’s job is to find the points of necessary overlap and protect everything else.

On the deep space clause

Several people have asked whether the principles above apply to teams operating under genuine relativistic conditions.

They do. With the caveat that “the goal is alignment, not simultaneity” becomes significantly more technically demanding when simultaneity is frame-dependent.

We are working on it.

// this document was reviewed asynchronously by 6 team members across 4 time zones